An overwhelming majority of submissions to the Commission on Electronic Voting have said that the Government's €35 million voting system is flawed and should be radically changed before its introduction.
With more than 90 per cent of the submissions highlighting flaws, only 10 of the 157 expressed satisfaction with the Nedap-Powervote system, which the Government wants to roll out for the local and European elections on June 11th.
Those opposed to system include the Irish Computer Society, the professional body for computer specialists, and business people such as Dr Michael Purser, founder of computer security company, Baltimore Technologies.
Many of the private individuals who made submissions said they simply did not trust the system and maintained it would interfere with the democratic process.
Some claimed it would remove privacy from the ballot and others called for the publication of the system's source code.
The commission is examining the submissions as part of its review of the safety and accuracy of the system. It opened the correspondence yesterday on condition that personal information from the submissions was not released.
While the Department of Environment and Local Government and Powervote defended the system, there were no submissions from Fianna Fáil and the PDs. Fine Gael, Labour, the Greens and the Workers' Party outlined their established reservations about the system.
In a paper reflecting views expressed in a large number of submissions, many of them from computer experts, the Irish Computer Society said the Nedap-Powervote system was unfit for use in elections or referendums.
"It is the unanimous view of the electronic voting committee for the Irish Computer Society that under no circumstances whatsoever should any electronic voting system be implemented which does include a voter verified audit trail."
The society said the system contained a "fundamental design flaw" in that it does not incorporate "any means to independently verify the results it produces". It went on to say that computer systems are "inherently error-prone and must be assumed to contain defects regardless of how thoroughly they have been assessed".
Dr Purser, who has advised several Government Departments and the European Commission on computer security issues, said there were two "glaring defects" in the system: the absence of a paper record; and the fact that the Government was not proposing to test the electronic system in parallel with the manual voting system.
He said: "This is unheard of in any serious situation. How can one possibly have complete confidence in a new system without running it in parallel beside the old, and comparing results?"
Mr David Algeo, a retired businessman and academic, said the testing of the system was not sufficient to ensure its accuracy and added that, in his experience, "transaction processing systems of any significance have audit trails". He said the Government "seems to prefer an incontestable result of uncertain accuracy to an accurate result that risks being challenged because of known errors".
A businessman, Mr David O'Higgins, said: "I would not permit the installation in my business of a solution with the characteristics so far discussed in respect of the proposed electronic voting system." Mr Joe McCarthy, a prominent campaigner against the system, claimed the Department of Environment and Local Government, which has responsibility for the system, was "now swamped by the complexity of the project".
However, the Department said it was satisfied that the system would be ready for safe, secure and efficient use in June. Powervote said its system would assure the secrecy and accuracy of the poll.
Mr James Dillon-Kelly, an election presiding officer during a trial of the system, said: "None of the voters I dealt with expressed any anxiety about security of the system. Indeed, most embraced it with enthusiasm."
Mr P.J. Kerr said that each voting unit should be tracked by satellite from the time it was dispatched to the polling station until the election was over.
